Thomson Grass Valley heads to IBC - Post News

Post, Sept, 2002

NEVADA CITY, CA -- Thomson Grass Valley comes to this year's BC with products that Tare the result of the company's continued reinvestment in new technologies. Thomson completed the acquisition of Grass Valley Group back in March, and it is believed that the Thomson Grass Valley combination will give Grass Valley a stronger European presence than its had to date.

Thomson Grass Valley business president / CEO Tim Thorsteinson notes that while the broadcast market is some-what flat, the company is cautiously optimistic and is continuing to reinvest I 5 percent of its earnings in developing systems for customers that will deliver improved efficiency and a return on investment.

At NAB back in April, Thomson Grass Valley introduced the XtenDD, digital production mixer. The company has sold nearly a dozen systems to European broadcasters, including HD versions to KBS in Korea and Teletech in Japan.

Thomson Grass Valley will also be showing its Viper FilmStream Camera at this year's BC show. Introduced at the NAB show, the Viper FilmStream is designed for high-end image capture, with applications including motion picture, episodic television and commercial production.

Capable of capturing 27.6 million pixels, the camera helps to eliminate the need for processing or filtering to boost image quality. The camera works on several progressive scan formats, including 1080 lines at 24/25/30 frames per second and 720 lines at 50/60 frames per second. In the 720 line/60 frame mode, the Viper FilmStream camera can provide slow motion effects at different playback speeds.

To achieve film-like output, the CCD signals of the Viper FilmStream camera are captured with 12-bit AID converters and are then converted to RGB data values using 10-bit logarithmic calculations. These calculations enable the camera to provide film-like results, taking advantage of the full dynamic range every CCD has to offer.

The Viper transfers its output to data tape or a disk recorder as a FilmStream datastream using a dual HD-SDI link as a carrier, with a combined data rate of 2.978 Gb/s. It maintains full resolution during this process with true progressive 1920-by-1080 pixels for every color.